Alright here's the scoop guys. There has been ongoing talk regarding switching or "porting" all the assets over to a new engine for the last few months. There is alot of reasons for this...one of the more important ones being the overall popularity of ET:QW diminishing as well as the constant pushing back of release dates. Right now the title will be releasing at around the same time as other engines that are far superior in ALL regards, namely Crysis.

There were many things we wanted to achieve in ET:QW that are inherently not possible or very difficult to do one of them being achieving the true mechwarrior scale. Since in ET:QW we are restricted to a 1 square mile map there really isn't alot we can do with hulking battlemechs on such a small map. Crysis features maps upto 60KM wide and with view distances between 14km and 60km!! If anything is swaying me the most this is it.

If you wonder why we are discussing this and very seriously considering it please download and watch these videos.

http://www.fileplanet.com/176155/download/Crysis-GDC-2007-Movie
http://www.fileplanet.com/173530/download/Crysis---DirectX-10-Trailer
http://www.fileplanet.com/173530/download/Crysis---DirectX-10-Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slN0QxRm19U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9JV7Bszonk


There are also a ton of things we wanted to do with the multiplayer as far a purchasing systems goes and massive battles with destructible and completely dynamic environments.
Take a quick read over this and notice the "Power Struggle" game mode....this is much more inline with our goals.

Crysis Multiplayer
From Crysis - inCrysis Wiki


Confirmed Multiplayer Features

    * There will be 6 DM/TDM maps and 6 Power Struggle maps and support for up to 32 players. The map sizes will vary from very small to very large maps and there won't be any ice maps. Some weather effects and the game's day-night cycle will work, though.

    * All the single player weapons and some additional MP specific weapons and tools will be available. Teammates can can drop weapons for each other and you can pick up the enemy's weapons. There isn't a time limit to buy items like in Counterstrike, but you will have to go to a plant you control or your home base to bring up a weapons purchase screen.

    * Sniper rifle scopes will not reflect light in MP, but they will reflect it in the single player campaign. You'll be able to see the tracer round from the sniper shot, though.

    * Crytek is testing Crysis on Linux servers. A dedicated Windows and Linux server package is planned for release with the retail game.

    * To prevent cheating, Punkbuster is being integrated into Crysis in conjunction with an inhouse tool made by Crytek.

    * Strength mode bunnyhopping will be limited due to the massive energy drain of a strength jump.

    * You'll need a Gamespy account to log on to multiplayer.

    * You'll be able to use the "All Seeing Eye" tool to connect to servers like you could for Far Cry.

    * The Crysis DVD must be in the disc drive to start multiplayer.

    * The net code has been completely rebuilt from scratch from CryEngine1.

    * There will not be persistent stats or ranked servers for Crysis. The prestige points earned in a round will be reset in the next round.



Unconfirmed MP features

As of May 1st, 2007:

    * There isn't an ingame voice chat system, though one is being considered.
    * The destructible environments for both Directx 9.0 and Directx 10 is still being tested.
    * If the autoturret is destroyable is not yet known.



Multiplayer Game Modes

Instant Action

Commonly referred to as DeathMatch (DM) in most other FPS', Crysis' Instant Action mode will see itself apart with the nanosuit's capabilities. The goal is simple; the player with the most kills at the end of the round wins. The maps are generally small and the action is intense!
A strength mode beatdown
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A strength mode beatdown
Gauss rifle IA kill
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Gauss rifle IA kill


Team Action

Commonly called Team DeathMatch (TDM) in other games, Team Action pits a US vs an NK force for the most kills in a round. The matches will be played on the same maps as Instant Action.
+1 for US: NK player taken down with Hurricane
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+1 for US: NK player taken down with Hurricane
Two US players have the high ground over the enemy
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Two US players have the high ground over the enemy


Power Struggle
Two US players look to ambush the NK team
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Two US players look to ambush the NK team

Most of Crysis' MP media coverage has been focused on Crytek's twist on a typical FPS' Capture The Flag (CTF) mode in a very notable gameplay mode titled Power Struggle.

In Power Struggle you’ll start the game as a primitive grunt – either US or Korean. Both teams will have a different nano-suit-design. You’ll be given just the very basics including basic armor and a pistol. As you make kills and achieve other goals (like securing capture points), you’ll earn credits which can be used to obtain bigger and better things. Your headquarters will be armed with automated missiles and turrets – effectively eliminating base campers altogether. Your headquarters may be an offshore submarine or inland base.

You’ll have access to two types of suits

1) The Prototype suit – You’ll have this at the beginning. This will give you very basic armour and strength capabilities 2) The Production Nano suit – You’ll have access to this once you’ve got enough credits. This will enable more advance armour and strength and also allow some degree of cloaking. This will require a high level of credits to obtain.




Crysis multiplayer will provide a wide variety of different vehicles and machines including: (but not limited to)

Water based

- Patrol Boats - Speedboats - Submarines

Land based

- Trucks - Jeeps - HUMVEE - Tanks

Air

- Attack Helicopters - VTOL Jets


Such vehicles and machines just don’t just spawn – your side will have to take control of certain capture zones in order to be able to manufacture them. The capture zones won’t be just markers on a map – rather they will be factories, ports, motorworks etc. For example, capturing a port will enable the production of water based vehicles. Capturing a zone will involve simply standing in a specific room for a small amount of time. You’ll gain credits for this also.

Once your team captures a zone, it doesn’t just start manufacturing the goods. It provides the means to manufacturer but you first must of all order your desired machine or vehicle through your PDA and have a certain number of credits available. Your PDA will provide you with a key code so that no one else can take what you’ve ordered. You will have the opportunity to give your order to another team member, also.

While you can have multiple vehicles/machines you can only manage one at a time. The others can be locked in a somewhat secure area. They won’t be completely safe though as the enemy can pick your locks and steal your equipment. Also, if for any reason you leave your vehicle and the enemy is snooping around they can jump in and claim it as theirs.

Throughout the game your rank will change as you gain more credits. The higher rank you have the more toys you’ll have access to.

Getting the right balance is perhaps the most pertinent issue. While new players may think it’s grossly unfair that all they will have is a single pistol to compete with other players with some serious firepower it won’t quite be like this. Firstly new players will be able to steal others machines/vehicles. Secondly, those players with higher ranks won’t be after the new players as they will have very little to gain from killing them and more so be jeopardizing their entire team. Players with high ranks will get the greatest benefit from killing opponents with a higher rank level. Based on this it’s likely that you’ll be fighting others with a similar rank.

Crysis Multiplayer brings a whole new level of realism. If your aircraft runs out of bombs, you won’t be able to simply fly over the runway to reload. You’ll have to land and retrieve them yourself. If you tank gets damaged you’ll have to use a welders touch to patch it up.

Perhaps the most stirring part of Crysis Multiplayer is the alien aspect that will be incorporated. Each map will have one to five alien crash sites that will be in randomly generated areas. After infiltrating one of these you’ll have to locate the alien core. Bringing this back to one of your capture zones will allow you to reverse engineer the alien technology for use in existing human technology. For example you’ll able to convert a standard tank into a Molecular Accelerator tank that fires deadly ice pieces. It won’t be at all easy to bring the core to a captured point. Once you’ve got the core, every player – both allied and opponent will know you’ve got it and will probably be after you. Therefore you’re going to need good teamwork to fend off any threat and protect you.

As you gain more alien cores and take them to each capture point, your team will gradually take control of the game. There are several ways to win the game, but the most notable is to produce a tank with a tactical nuke and destroy the enemy HQ with one shot. Again, all players will be notified of its existence and it will be up to each team to attack/defend the tank.

One more unique factor is the time of each game. Depending on the servers settings, a game could last as long as ten real hours! (Keyword: Could) With the dynamic day/night cycles in Crysis, it's possible that you could be playing on the same map during the day and under the stars!
US VTOL fires on a tank while the NK Autoturret fires on another VTOL


Another Reason I would like to switch is we could truly work on a next gen engine...and not a 6 year old one. Here is some interesting features.

Crysis Graphics
From Crysis - inCrysis Wiki


Crysis will be one of the first few games to ship with native support for the DirectX 10 API. It is soon to be one among Call of Juarez, Lost Planet and Call of Heroes (patched revision) as a first generation DirectX 10 computer game.

The CryEngine 2 boasts many impressive graphical features, some of which include:

Depth of field - Blurs objects out of focus


HDR lighting - Simulates the effect of bright light on the human eye


Day and Night Cycle - All lighting on every object in Crysis is dynamic (no pre-generated lighting), so night and day transition smoothly and accurately from dawn, noon, dusk and midnight, in real time.


Interactive flora - Trees, bushes, grass and leaves bend, freeze and break realistically, in real time


Now imagine yourself walking through a jungle clearing trees and foliage with your 80 ton battlemech!

Motion blur - Objects moving fast in relation to the viewpoint blur realistically



Parallax mapping - Creates an illusion of depth on flat surfaces



Realtime ambient maps - Atmospheric (reflected) lighting is applied to every in-game object. NO BAKED SHADOWS!!!



shadows - Blurs the edge of all shadows to simulate "penumbra" effect



Soft particles - Eliminates visible hard lines from smoke, explosions, fog etc.



Subsurface scattering - Light scatters as it passes through translucent objects such as glass, leaves and human flesh



3D Ocean Technology - Shaders, physics algorithms, high resolution meshes and textures combine to create realistically animated waves, complete with accurate caustic effects and reflections





Finally a feature list for your review:
Real time editing, bump mapping, static lights, network system, integrated physics system, shaders, shadows and a dynamic music system are just some of the state of-the-art features the CryENGINE™ 2 offers.

The CryENGINE™ 2 comes complete with all of its internal tools and also includes the CryENGINE 2 Sandbox world editing system. Licensees receive full source code and documentation for the engine and tools. Support is provided directly from the R & D Team that continuously develops the engine and can arrange teaching workshops for your team to increase the learning process.

The engine supports all video and hardware currently on the market. New hardware support is constantly added as it becomes available.

• CryENGINE Sandbox: Is a real-time game editor offering "What you see is what you PLAY" feedback.

• Renderer: integrates indoor and outdoor technology seamlessly. Offers rendering support for DirectX 8/9/10, Xbox360, PS3

• Physics System: supports vehicles, rigid bodies, liquid, rag doll, cloth and soft body effects. The system is integrated with the game and tools.

• Animation System: Playback and blending between motion data (captured or key framed) combined with inverse kinematics (using biomechanical hints) and physical simulations. Special attention was applied to realistic human animation (e.g. adapting to uneven terrain, eye tracking, facial animation, leaning when running around corners, natural motion transitions).

• AI System: Enables team based AI and AI behaviors defined by scripts. Ability to create custom enemies and behaviors without touching the C++ code.

• Data-driven Sound System: Complex sounds can be easily created and offer innovative use and impression in studio quality in any available surround configuration. Multi-platform compatibility is guaranteed by FMOD’s sound library.

• Interactive Dynamic Music System: Improved playback of music tracks by an arbitrarily logic that can react on any game events and support the player to experience a movie-like sound track.

• Environmental Audio: Achieve a dense sound impression by accurately reproduce sounds from nature with seamless blending between environments and their effects from interior/exterior locations.

• Network Client and Server System: Manages all network connections for the multiplayer mode. It is a low-latency network system based on client/server architecture. The module was completely rewritten to accomplish the demands of next-generation multiplayer games.

• Shaders: A script system used to combine textures in different ways to produce visual effects. Supports real time per-pixel lighting, bumpy reflections, refractions, volumetric glow effects, animated textures, transparent computer displays, windows, bullet holes, and shinny surfaces.

• Terrain: Uses an advanced heightmap system and polygon reduction to create massive, realistic environments. The view distance can be up to 2km when converted from game units.

• Voxel Object: Allows creating geometry a heightmap system wouldn’t support to create cliffs, caves, canyons and alien shapes. Voxel editing is as easy as heightmap editing and fast in rendering.

• Lighting and Shadows: A combination of precalculated properties with high quality real time shadows to produce a dynamic environment. Includes high-resolution, correct perspective, and volumetric smooth-shadow implementations for dramatic and realistic indoor shadowing. Supports advanced particles technology and any kind of volumetric lighting effects on particles.

• Fog: Includes volumetric, layer and view distance fogging even with non homogeneous media to enhance atmosphere and tension.

• Resource Compiler: Assets become compiled in the platform dependent format by the resource compiler. This allows to do global changes (e.g. mipmap computation, mesh stripification) depending on presets and platforms without scarifying loading time.

• Polybump™ 2: Standalone or fully integrated with other tools including 3ds max™. Creates a high quality surface description that allows very quick extraction of surface features normal maps in tangent-space or object-space, displacement maps, unoccluded area direction, accessibility and other properties.

• Scripting system: Based on the popular LUA language. This easy to use system allows the setup and tweaking of weapons/game parameters, playing of sounds and loading of graphics without touching the C++ code.

• Flow graph: The flow graph system allows the designers to code game logic without touching a line of code. Coding basically becomes connecting boxes and defining properties.

• Modularity: Entirely written in modular C++, with comments, documentation and subdivisions into multiple DLLs.

• Multi-threading: Support for multiprocessors improves multiplayer by reducing network latency and speeds up CPU computations in various areas.

• 64Bit: We support 32bit and 64bit OS to allow more memory being utilized.





Now i know this post was really long, but as you can see....i think ET:QW is completely outmatched and if we are to spend 1000's of man hours working on this project for portfolios, communites and fun I would much rather release a much higher quality title into what i believe very strongly will be a longer lasting game.

We have discussed this on length between all the Dev's but i really want to hear what the community thinks.

Crysis for sure. Way superior.

Great job so far. Definitely looking forward to this mechwarrior mod. 

  this is like a dream come true!

True enough but we don't want people to get the impression that we are licensing the engine.

Well MWLL is free and Crysis will be out in November.

According to [1], the SDK will be available on the day the game is released.
However, we're still praying to the deities of game development that we get our hands on the beta SDK.




[1] http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=452

I am sure they have some long time battletech fanatics there. Don't worry.